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GTA Review
Post: 18/10/2013

It’s brilliant, of course.

Given the pedigree and almost brutish levels of hype surrounding Grand Theft Auto V, it would have been a surprise if this wasn’t the five-star humdinger that you expected. But here we are: Grand Theft Auto V is the pinnacle of open-world video game design and a colossal feat of technical engineering. It takes a template laid down by its predecessors and expands upon it, improving on and streamlining some of its rougher aspects. It doesn’t break out of that template and can be brash, nasty and nihilistic. But for all its more unsavoury aspects, this is a game built with skilled mechanical expertise and creative artistry.

And money. Lots of it. If the reported cost of £170m is to be taken at face value, GTA V is the most expensive video game ever assembled. If nothing else, that lavishness seeps from every pore of Los Santos, Rockstar’s twisted facsimile of Los Angeles and the grand stage for our crime caper. It is a virtual world of such tremendous scale and fine detail that it continues to baffle how the developers have managed to squeeze it all onto current generation hardware.

The urban sprawl of the city itself is a tangle of roads and definable districts; Strawberry is an area of limited social mobility, characterised by boarded-up shops, tatty slat-board houses and gangland graffiti. Downtown is a cluster of high-reaching skyscrapers, the city’s homeless shuffling alongside office yuppies. Rockford Hills houses the city’s wealthiest, lavish mansions sitting alongside expensive hotels, tennis courts and golf clubs (both with playable sports, they’re good too). Vespucci Beach is a hive of swim-suited pin-ups and party boats. Vinewood is the neon-splashed refuge of movie-star wannabes.

Travel north and the city disperses into countryside, reach Blaine County and you find a brushland littered with trailer parks and filthy hick bars under the shadow of the County’s mountain range.

It is enormous. And while the broad strokes of GTA V’s map are impressive enough, the finer details are lavished with the same care. Boxes piled carelessly in a player’s safe-house. The crude sign for a chinese restaurant daubed on sheet metal fencing. The evening sun dappling an orange sheen across the landscape as it glints over the Los Santos highways. Hell, I was even impressed that my character’s flip-flops actually flip-flopped. There is no expense spared on any inch of its colossal mass.

To put it another way, Los Santos feels like a city that people live in, rather than a virtual playground built for your enjoyment. The danger of this approach is that real cities might not be as much fun as a bespoke urban-Americana theme park, but Rockstar make it work. My admiration for video game designers knows no bounds, but it befuddles as to how a mass of land as huge as Los Santos is so tightly crafted and densely interactive. There’s a natural openness, diversity and cogency to the design of the map that makes it a pleasure to explore. And it’s a place in which the game’s missions can slot into in a way that leads to emergent and unexpected thrills.

I’m in Downtown, and after stealing some precious weaponry for a jewelry store heist from a moving van, I find myself under the attention of local constabulary. Sirens blaring behind me, I gun my car through the latticework roads before finding a freeway. Thundering into oncoming traffic, cars scatter and smash into the partition. It’s not long before I’m in countryside. I slide off the freeway into the brushland, sweeping round dusty trails and leaping over grass hills. Losing sight of the cops, I dump my vehicle behind a bar, walk into a discount store, change my clothes and find another car. I’m miles away from where the chase started, in a completely different area, purely due to the natural course of my actions. Now I’m out in the sticks, free of the law and with a scenic trip back to the city ahead.

Such a scenario is enabled by a few things. The map design is one, with wide roads that allow you to weave through its dense traffic and a cogency that means the expanse of land feels connected from top to bottom.

Secondly, Rockstar has tweaked how the police hunt you. Now you can play a game of hide and seek from the very beginning, nipping out of sight down an alleyway or under a bridge and watch police cars prowl by. Or you can go hell for leather and try to lose them in a high-speed, destructive chase. Your choice.

Thirdly, the car handling in V is much sharper than the heaviness of IV. It retains just enough of IV’s weight and hyperactivity to make crashes feel consequential and handbrake turns tricky to control, but is tightened up enough to make driving more instantly gratifying. IV’s handling was great but took some work to master, V’s handling is better and easy to pick up. This extends to sea-based vehicles and flying aircraft.

The driving is one part of GTA V’s technical improvement over its predecessor. But before we delve too much further into general mechanics, let’s talk about V’s most disruptive change. Instead of the traditional focus on one character, GTA V has you playing as three separate crooks. It’s a change that seems so basic on paper, but in practice is a revelation, making Los Santos’s huge expanse more negotiable as you freely switch between each character, adding spice to missions and allowing for a more layered narrative.

Let’s meet the boys. Michael has been described by Rockstar as “the GTA character who won”; a retired thief that has found his way into witness protection while keeping the stash of cash he appropriated over the years. He lives a quiet, boring life in a huge mansion in Rockford Hills with his wife and two children. He hates it.

Franklin is a young gang-banger from Strawberry. At the start of the game, he is working as a repo man for a dodgy Armenian car dealer, chasing down those who are (apparently) late with their payments. Franklin has his own moral code, but makes no excuses for who he is, with his ambitions lying only in a higher quality of crime.

Trevor is Michael’s former partner, a redneck psychopath and sexual deviant. He is an extraordinarily nasty piece of work and Grand Theft Auto’s most disturbing character.

Each character is a tribute to crooks from GTA’s history. With his mafioso swagger and obsession with 80s movie quotes, Michael is Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti. Franklin is San Andreas’ Carl Johnson. And Trevor? Trevor may well be you. Trevor is the Grand Theft Auto player that causes carnage and squelches pedestrians just to achieve a five-star wanted rating and watch the following mayhem unfold. He is the twisted, ugly reflection of all the nasty stuff that GTA lets you do but rarely explicitly encourages. Rockstar wants you to look at his face and feel uncomfortable. And it works.

They are not a nice bunch, to put it mildly. Rockstar have seemingly taken one of the main criticisms of GTA IV to heart: that of the disconnect between protagonist Niko Bellic’s sense of guilt and honour and the gleeful chaos that he finds himself causing. GTA V tackles that head on, making an effort to contextualise everything you do, from the main thrust of the characters’ motivation to the side-missions and activities they go on. Franklin is a speed-loving thrill-seeker, so he’s the one you go to for street races. And Trevor’s the only character with “Rampage” missions, such as being tasked with wiping out a never-ending army of rednecks in a blind rage after one of them called him something we cannot reprint in a family newspaper.

Given GTA’s sense of freedom, you can cause wanton carnage on the streets with whomever you wish. But if you’re that why inclined, you may find yourself switching to Trevor. It’s a curious form of method-acting, Rockstar making sure that all the frolics from GTAs past are available to you, but providing a choice of people so that enjoying them doesn’t clash with the characters they have created.

This does come at something of a cost, however, in that GTA V’s main narrative is almost relentlessly misanthropic. Niko’s words may have jarred against his actions in GTA IV, but he was written with a strange sense of warmth that is largely absent here. Franklin is the most sympathetic character, a smart kid that has travelled the wrong path, and Michael has a twisted honour of his own. But largely these are horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people.

GTA has often been praised for its satirical skewering of America’s social exceptionalism and artificiality, but this time Rockstar has taken a sledgehammer to it, mercilessly bludgeoning a global obsession with social media and vacuous celebutantes. It’s strong stuff and the humour --some clever, some crass -- is often very funny. But it is comedy of the blackest kind. This is Grand Theft Auto at its most graphic and barbaric, and it is not always to the game’s benefit.

While its story can be grim and heavy-handed, it is weaved terrifically into GTA’s sense of interaction. The three characters work both as an authorial sense of control of Rockstar, as they hit story beats from differing viewpoints, and a sense of optional pacing for the player. If you find yourself tiring of the company of one character, you can shift to another to continue their own story. Each character accepts jobs from different people, and the missions manage to achieve a series best for variety and excitement. While the GTA staples of driving and shooting continue to make up the brunt of the missions, the context and seamless ease with which GTA V switches between land, air and even sea make the main missions consistently excellent.

These missions are enabled by vastly improved mechanics. We’ve already discussed the driving, but gunplay has seen an equal boost in quality. There’s a real heft to the cover-based blasting -- taking clear inspiration from Rockstar stablemate Max Payne 3 -- while a selection of aiming assists allow gunfights to be tailored to your taste and ability. Switching cover and quick movement in small areas can be clumsy, but the tight aiming and hefty feedback make shootouts a thrill.

The action is further improved when the player-characters come together. Each has their own skills which can be bolstered by practicing that skill (go to flight school to improve flying, shooting range to improve weapon accuracy) and they also have a unique special ability. Michael’s is slowing down time during gunfights, Trevor’s is a rage mode which bolsters his attack power while reducing the damage he takes, and Franklin can slow time and exert more control while driving.

Switching quickly between characters brings a crackle of energy to missions and chases, allowing you to take up different positions in a shootout, or perform an a different task altogether. One mission has Trevor flying a helicopter, Michael rappelling down the side of a building and Franklin covering with a sniper rifle from an opposing rooftop. It’s excellent stuff.

The characters work best together when performing one of GTA V’s ‘Heists’. Inspired by the success of GTA IV’s ‘Three Leaf Clover’ bank robbery, the heists are the major set-pieces of GTA V and the game’s undoubted peaks.

You work on a heist from conception, to preparation, to execution. You choose your approach, sometimes a case of stealthy or guns blazing, sometimes a decision between drastically different missions. You choose your team from a selection of hackers, drivers and trigger-men. Some crew members are better than others, but less skilled criminals will take a smaller cut. It throws up an issue of balance; a strong hacker can give you more time without alarms, but a poor driver may choose glacially-paced getaway vehicles.

My first heist I chose to skimp on the trigger-man as I was hoping to get through without having to fire a gun. Trouble was, the idiot I did hire then crashed his motorcycle during our daring escape. The amount of money he lost was a greater percentage than the cut a more skilled operator would have taken. It’s a gamble, but if you take crew members on more than one heist, their skill improves with the cost staying the same. As long as they survive.

It’s a small but significant slice of strategy and decision-making that make the heists feel like they are your own. The actual execution isn’t as open as, say, Deus Ex, where you can make snap decisions about stealth and action on the fly -- once you have decided on an approach the game will tailor scripted objectives around your choices. But this is Grand Theft Auto at its best, with multi-faceted missions that meld Rockstar’s skill at directing action with a heightened sense of the player freedom that defines the series. Oh, and there are finally checkpoints within missions, greatly reducing any sense of frustration with what can be a tough game to crack.

The headline features of multiple characters and heists are a success, then, but the details are equally accomplished. Despite its boggling scale, this is the most technically solid Grand Theft Auto; the frame-rate rarely dips, the traditional pop-in is present but greatly reduced (usually only apparent form the air) and bugs are not so frequent. Such size almost dictates the odd quirk, and you’ll occasionally see pedestrians stumbling into walls or cars stuck in fences. At one point the car I’d stashed in Franklin’s garage had birthed a clone which had precariously stacked itself on the original, and I also managed to get Trevor stuck in his garage after pinching a 4x4 and being unable to squeeze past its frame.

No matter. Grand Theft Auto V is still an extraordinary technical achievement and a fabulous piece of entertainment. I’m not sure every aspect is an unqualified success, and its violent bitterness can be a little wearying, but this is a bold and scintillating full-stop to an explosive generation of video games. It dares the rest of the blockbuster industry to try and match its scope and, even with new consoles on the horizon, it may be some time before anything steps up.